Bunched Up

-- I don't know that the Golden Globes awards show was under any obligation to highlight some of the actresses and women whose personal stories ignited the recent wave of attention paid to the way powerful men in the entertainment industry abused women. If the Hollywood Foreign Press Association wanted to give its honorary award to Oprah Winfrey, it wasn't required to suddenly switch it to Mira Sorvino, Rose McGowan, Asia Argento or any of the other victims of predators. But since a number of actresses invited activists along as their "plus ones" for the evening, it could have strengthened their statement considerably if the night was full of the faces that had been hidden and silenced in this awful mess and not those of their abusers.

-- My impression of Fire and Fury is that it's got some problems in the way it approaches history, but leaving out some important information that might bring a reader to different conclusions than the ones the author prefers. The heavy European focus and omission of Pacific and Asian incidents puts too much of a thumb on the scale to make the thesis really convincing. After all, American bombers conducted raids just as deadly to civilians in Tokyo as English bombers did in Germany. What's that? There's another book called Fire and Fury? What's it about? Well, why the hell would I want to waste my life reading that?

-- I've crossed a lot of rivers and even some lakes in my life but I'm pretty sure that no one in 3987 will be talking about it the way we note this crossing today.

-- So a high schooler wrote Albert Einstein about a geometry problem she and her friends were assigned to solve, and Einstein wrote back. This was often his habit, especially when his correspondents were children. He gave her the clues to get started on the answer, but his penmanship and lapse into German handwriting made it look like he got the answer wrong, and several news stories had some fun with the discrepancy. Some humorless scolds didn't, among them the teacher and principal of the student who wrote the letter. They didn't like being bypassed for the answer and so offered a pretty clear diagram of what a snit squared looked like.